The Schwartz Report

Many Enterprises Will Wait Before Deploying Windows 10

While Microsoft is expecting 1 billion devices to run Windows 10 within the next three years, the company better not count on large enterprises to hit that ambitious goal early.The results of a survey of enterprise Windows IT pros shows a vast majority will wait at least six months to begin deploying the new operating system and a substantial amount will wait more than a year.

The survey, conducted at last month's Microsoft's Ignite conference in Chicago by Windows tools vendor Adaptiva, showed that 71 percent will wait at least six months and nearly half (49 percent) will wait more than a year to upgrade. Only 186 people participated in the survey, which would lead some to question its statistical validity, but Adaptiva Founder and CTO Deepak Kumar explained all of the people interviewed are deeply involved in the management of their organizations' client systems.

Those responding to an online survey conducted by Redmond magazine at the beginning of this year found that nearly 41 percent planned to upgrade in the first year.

A vast majority (84 percent) of respondents used Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) and 40 percent managed more than 10,000 nodes. Eight percent managed 100,000 nodes or more. The largest percentage of those surveyed (35 percent) managed between 1,000 and 10,000 systems; 19 percent had 100 to 1,000 systems and 7 percent were small shops with less than 100 systems. Not surprisingly the larger organizations are most primed to wait.

"With the free upgrade and some of the technology they've put in for ease of upgrade, the expectation in the market is there will be this landslide of Windows 10 adoption," said Kumar. "The surprise for me, is what people are planning to do with Windows 10 is the same as they have done with every other version: slow adoption."

The fact that organizations may wait is hardly a shocking news flash -- it's consistent with best practices analysts and consultants have given regarding major operating system upgrades since organizations first deployed Windows PCs. "People want to test it and have complete control where it goes out when it goes out," Kumar said.

Microsoft could still hit the 1 billion milestone if it's successful in convincing the vast number of consumers with Windows 7 and Windows 8 on their systems to take advantage of the free upgrade as well as a wide swath of new PCs and tablets expected to appear in the coming months.

Another noteworthy finding from the survey: only 11 percent had at least some machines with Windows XP still in use. This is a marked decline from a year ago at TechEd where 53 percent claimed to still have PCs running the discontinued operating system. Not surprisingly, Windows 7 was most preferred operating system, with 84 percent saying that their organization is running that OS. Windows 8 was in use, at least to some extent, by 57 percent of those organizations.